The Oppositional Imagination (RLE Feminist Theory)

Feminism, Critique and Political Theory

Joan Cocks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136203862
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Oppositional Imagination draws together elements from Marxism, analytical philosophy, post-structuralism, and post-colonial criticism to analyse the elusive interplay of culture and power. It focuses its attention on cultural domination, opposition and evasion in the realm of sex and gender.

Joan Cocks reflects on questions crucial to both political theorists and feminists: the relationship between political theory and practical life; the possibility of bringing together a philosophical and a literary language to comprehend and evoke concrete experience; and the reconciliation of radical political commitment with an appreciation of shades of grey in the social world. She explores the variety of ways in which power and eroticism intersect; the liberating and tyrannical impulses of marginal cultures; and the place of the loyalist, the eccentric, the critic, the traitor, and the rebel in the sexual struggle.

The Oppositional Imagination reaffirms the centrality of political theory and feminist practice while at the same time challenging certain of their key principles in thought-provoking ways.

Part One

On Theory

1

Consciousness and Culture

The elements that will help us compose an analysis of cultural power descend from a number of grand theoretical approaches that are different and even, at times, antagonistic, yet are complementary in important ways too. Some are complementary because they are in fact transfigurations of what Edward Said has called a “traveling theory”: one that has been beckoned from its place of origin into distant geographical locations, altered historical situations, and novel political circumstances – and has been both revised and preserved along the way.¹ The line that begins with Marx and leads from Antonio Gramsci to Raymond Williams marks the route that one such traveling theory takes. Other approaches are complementary through being more tangentially connected. They have been mapped out in the same intellectual epoch, with the same concatenation of thoughts in the air; or there have been criss-crossing influences among their key authors, who either are eclectic enough to have drawn on a variety of other thinkers or are idiosyncratic enough for a variety of other thinkers to have drawn upon them. All these approaches, finally, can be said to have a certain commonality to them through having been fed off the same large reel of historical dilemmas.

Thus Stuart Hampshire, Edward Said, Michel Foucault, and Gramsci-Williams (taken, for a moment, together as one) do not write out of what even in the most attenuated way can be called a single tradition. They do not set the same mood or strike the same attitude in their work. They do not direct their attention to the same domains of inquiry. They do not begin with identical methodological presuppositions, and except in the vaguest of ways their political allegiances do not overlap. Yet there are among them certain striking thematic repetitions, certain similar analytical obsessions – certain ways, too, in which their separate arguments and insights are reciprocally illuminating. What is flawed in each argument alone, moreover, is improved by the selective combination of the arguments together. For in some cases there is too great a faith in subjective agency, in others too great an emphasis on objective determination. Some defend an overly centrist strategy of resistance, others an overly localist one. In certain arguments we find a naive esteem for a final harmony in social relations, and in others, a hypertrophied sensitivity to the possibilities of repression in any collective way of life.

1.

Two basic principles on which all our theorists agree are, first, that the world receives its order, and objects in the world their identity, from schemes of classification rooted in transient modes of social life; and second, that those classificatory schemes reflect and support specific ensembles of social interests, intentions, and desires. These principles pave the way for a general preoccupation with what can be called, very broadly, “cultural-political” questions, or at least with questions directly antecedent to them. Such questions concern the way in which human consciousness is constituted socially and historically, rather than universally and transcendentally; the process by which ideas become solidified and rigidly fixed, and the counter-process by which engrained habits of thought lose their social potency and hold over the individual mind; the relation of the genius of an individual thinker or idea or cultural product to discursive impositions of substantive truth, style, theme, and allusion; the identity and location of groups, institutions, and movements that generate and protect, or challenge and attempt to replace, dominant efforts of knowledge and imagination; the dynamic of entrenchment, extension, erosion, degeneration, and collapse of a socio-cultural whole.

In pursuing these questions, all of the theorists have poised themselves on a tightrope between opposite kinds of analysis. One kind inflates culture to an expression of the eternal presence or immanent development of a universal “Spirit” or “Mind.” The other reduces it to a superstructural effect of a material base. Our theorists keep their balance between the two, first, by insisting on the concrete materiality of things to do with cultural life. They understand this materiality variously, to be sure: as the situated nature of all thinking, which always occurs in a world of objects of which the thinker is necessarily one; as the prominence of the human body as a target of cultural-political intervention and discipline; as the intimate connection between scholarly activity and geo-imperial adventure; as the tie of culture to a ruling class or to a subaltern class challenging its rule; as the correspondence between contemporary institutions of cultural production and massively centralized economic power and interests. But second, our theorists show a strong, clear disdain for what Gramsci – the one to find the perfect phrase-calls the “metaphysics of matter”² All of them stand against the notion that the world as it is physically given, and apart from any sense or thing humans make of it, is the sole or primary or even secondary-but-still-crucial repository of truth.

It is with the notion of a general “anti-metaphysics“ that I want to begin assembling the theoretical elements offered to us by Gramsci, Hampshire, Williams, Foucault and Said. It is an appropriate beginning, given my larger project. For isn’t a key question feminism poses to the contemporary age whether the function of culture has been not to create Beauty, articulate Truth, and accumulate Knowledge, but to elaborate and impose the rule of masculine over feminine? And isn’t a key question feminism poses to itself whether the rule and the culture enforcing it have their root cause in the body – in the male and female bodies as physiological repositories of essential truths?

In his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci supposes, and surely he must be right, that religion is the origin of the belief that the objective reality of the world lies outside all human theoretical and practical labor upon it. The religious teaching that “the world, nature, the universe were created by God before the creation of man, and therefore man found the world already made, catalogued, and defined once and for all… has become an iron fact of ‘common sense’ and survives with the same solidity even if religious feeling is dead or asleep.”³ Against religion, common sense, and (his real target here) vulgar Marxism, Gramsci states that objectivity is unintelligible apart from the specific way it is constituted by the intellectuality of “man,” which abstractly is guaranteed by his being a user of language, and concretely is given its content by the particular form of society in which he lives. With an emphasis that will have everything to do with his assessment of culture’s importance for revolutionary politics, Gramsci declares that all people, quite apart from what they do “professionally” in their economic function, are philosophers with particular conceptions of the world, artists with particular tastes, moral theorists with a conscious line of moral conduct.⁴ “Spon-aneous philosophy” is “proper to everybody”⁵ – not only through everyone’s participation in some discourse of common sense, popular religion, or critical thinking, but more fundamentally still. For “even in the slightest manifestation of any intellectual activity whatever, in ‘language,’ there is contained a specific conception of the world.”⁶ Such world conceptions are rooted always in a particular mode of practice, and a social context, and a civilization. The belief that man can achieve some external, cosmic standpoint from which to view the world “objectively” must be another “hangover of the concept of God.”⁷ What is “objectively real”⁸ can mean only “humanly objective,” which means “historically subjective:”⁹ “no more than a conventional, that is, ‘historico-cultural’ construction.”¹⁰

It was the political implications of such an anti-metaphysics of matter and truth that most interested Gramsci, and in any case he did not always follow the philosophical ones consistently through. If we want to be sure of what those philosophical implications are, then, we will have to look elsewhere. Let us turn our sights just for the moment from fascist Italy to postwar England, from Marxist revolutionary politics to academic linguistic analysis, and from Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks to, say, Stuart Hampshire’s Thought and Action - a text that, while wedded to the philosophy of mind and the vantage point of the individual “man,” presents starting-principles for cultural-political theory in the general spirit of Gramsci’s own.¹¹ The first of these principles is a far more detailed and radical restatement of Gramsci’s notion that human intellectuality gives specific form to the world. Hampshire attacks the assumption that convention and artificiality rest on a more fundamental “tier of basic and natural discriminations which is independent of any institution of social life.”¹² “Reality is not divided into units that are identifiable apart from some particular system of classification”;¹³ there is no system which is most in tune with any real or true divisions of the world; the description of reality is essentially “inexhaustible,” in that “[t]here is no theoretically determinable limit to the variety of new types of classification that may be introduced.”¹⁴ It is the development of new interests, new purposes, new kinds of knowledge, new practical needs, new forms of social life which give rise to new types of classification, and what these new forms and types will be there is no way of specifying in advance.

The secret of language, in sum, does not lie in some objective truth external to it which it identifies for thought and speech. That secret lies rather first in reality’s being an open field for interpretation. It lies second in language’s own internal function, which is to divide that field into identifiable, recurrent segments.¹⁵ It lies finally in the ensemble of social and historical purposes, interests, and needs with which the divisions inevitably are fused, since it is humans’ intentionality as active agents in the world that provides them with the impulse to discriminate among one object and another, their sociality that provides them with the impulse to speech, and their historicity which provides them with an inheritance of discriminations already in place. Hampshire too hints at the religious lineage of the belief in an objectively true reality knowable from an elevated and disinterested god-point, and while it is the pretensions of traditional philosophy, not of vulgar Marxism, that he is out to deflate, the case he makes is very close to Gramsci’s own.¹⁶ Observation and description are undertaken by people situated in, not above, the world, and a particular classificatory scheme, fostering and fostered by particular social purposes and needs, already has divided that world into a particular array of objects before any single effort of observation and description begins. The paradoxical nature of language becomes apparent here. Its function of imposing specific rules of identity or individuation and resemblance or classification has a necessity to it: thought cannot occur unless relatively persisting things of different kinds and types can be thought about. But the system of discriminations linguistically imposed is always fundamentally contingent. Thus it is that, by “fixing” the world conceptually, language at once frees thought to think and permits it to think in only one of an infinite number of logically possible ways.

Thought, then, has a double relation to language, being indebted to and constrained by it. If I can anticipate an analytic move we have yet to prepare ourselves to make, in any struggle between established and marginal cultural orders, indebtedness and constraint will be the twin antagonistic themes. Both sorts of orders, of course, will declare that their antagonism is that of the other’s falsity against their own truth. But what the dominant discourse has distinctively to offer on its own behalf are conceptual discriminations that are elaborate, evocative, and refined, because of the long and vital history in which they have had time to build up. The marginal schemes, being either mustier or cruder (depending on whether they are residues of some now defunct mode of life or are only just coming into being) will have a different kind of advantage. Through their very marginality to most people’s routine sense of the world, they hold out a promise to emancipate thought from encrusted habits of reflection, criticism, and imagination. Now there are, theoretically speaking, an infinite number of ways to make sense of the world that the dominant way rules out. In practical terms, however, any way that arises from inside a mode of life to challenge the dominant scheme will come from the relatively few schemes that are not utterly bizarre but share in many of the old conceptual presuppositions. That is, in actual practice, the emancipation of thought from its old habits – which, being simultaneously its induction into new ones, is not at all the same thing as a pure or final emancipation – will be extended in the name of not a weirdly strange world (for how could such a world be thought up or understood?) but the familiar world transfigured in ways that are at least vaguely comprehensible and, for exactly that reason, politically more than psychologically threatening to it. Conversely, while the established scheme prohibits in the abstract every possible kind of conceptual seduction, practically it stands against terms at once at odds with and closely resembling, in certain ways, its own. Cultural struggles, in short, are waged in and over what for everyone is partly the same conceptual field, which is not to say that a startlingly new field unimaginable to everyone may not be the struggle’s distant result.

But we have jumped straight from human intellectuality and the “intellectualization” of the world to collective cultural antagonisms. We must backtrack to ask ourselves how conceptual schemes are intertwined not simply with ideas but with practice, so that “culture” can have the sense of a “whole mode of life,” and cultural antagonisms a palpable significance.

Here, too, Hampshire helps us out with a philosophical discussion of what for him is an entirely intimate relationship between thought and action. In establishing the types of things there are in the world, language establishes the types of things towards which it is possible to have active intentions. The limits of what people are able to think set the limits of what they can think to try to do. Action on its side manifests a particular direction of intelligence – it is not “bisectable” from the individual’s particular intention, the given cultural range of possible intentions, and conventional norms of what counts as what kind of action in what circumstances. This is not at all to say that there is nothing else to action but the intentionality of the actor; the impersonal, objective force of established classificatory habits; and of course physical movement. An individual’s unconscious motivations,

social groups that seek to manipulate individuals’ beliefs and actions in various ways, and logics of practice that confine the thought and action of dominant and subordinate alike, may be doing their own secret work. But the internal relation of thought to action is not in any way diminished as a consequence.

That relation is even more complex still, for what also cannot be separated sharply from the individual act and the entire domain of action is what Hampshire calls “the whole person” and what I will call “sensibility.” This is the current of taste, judgment, desire, and sympathy that an individual shows not merely (and not always directly) through the single action but over the much longer run, and which gives the single action a dense reference to the life of consciousness that an action would not have if there were only one discrete purpose or meaning behind it. The sensibility expressed in or (for this can happen too) exaggerated, corrupted, suspended, or betrayed by a single act includes the way a person

thinks and expresses his thoughts and feelings, the things that he notices and neglects, the attitudes that he adopts, the feelings that he restrains and the feelings to which he allows free play, the words that he chooses to use or that he uses unreflectingly, the gestures and physical reactions that he controls or suppresses, the plans that he makes and the sudden impulses that occur to him.¹⁷

Once again to move beyond Hampshire’s scale of analysis: if a culture as a whole mode of life includes specific habits of thought and possibilities for action, it also includes a certain range of characteristic sensibilities, although any real individual, being an individual, will be more complicated than any type of sensibility would suggest. This given range of sensibilities a marginal culture will be sure to contest, as it contests the given range of thought and action more discretely defined.

Individuals acquire at birth, then, a particular system of classification and with it particular ranges of possible interests, intentions, actions, and sensibilities. This cultural inheritance is not the product of any individual’s will but instead is the context within which “he exercises his will, and makes choices,”¹⁸ and as such it is bound to seem natural to him. Whether it is truly natural or artificial, Hampshire says it is “pointless” to ask, as it is the nature of man to think and act conventionally.¹⁹ The opposite way to put the claim is that any particular order of thought, action, and virtue “contains an element of legislation or prescription.”²⁰ That specific “human powers and activities” count as “normal and customary” is as much an imposition as it is a necessary condition of developed cultural life.²¹ Not any malignance of a ruling social group, nor even any malignance of an impersonal cultural order, but the inevitable limitations of cultural upbringing, the social weight of the conventionally given, plus in every individual life, the sheer “inertia of habit,”²² will ensure that humans begin living life within a relatively narrow circle of thought, interests, and action, the boundaries of which will be very hard to see, no less to see beyond. At its extreme pole, this comparative confinement and habituality of conventional life become a mean narrowness of thought and dullness of action. Hampshire calls this degenerated condition “the unreflecting state of a morality left to itself”²³ – when purposes “harden into habit and heedlessness, when comparison and reflection die … and … intentions are fixed, always formulated … in the same narrow set of terms,”²⁴ when there is “a naive confidence in established classifications of specific situations, actions and mental processes as being the permanently obvious and self-justifying classifications.”²⁵

Hampshire’s idea of an unreflecting state of morality left to itself will turn out to bear a distant resemblance to Raymond Williams’ notion, which we shall meet head on a bit later, of a “selective tradition.” This is the plucking and sanctifying of a society’s “meaningful past” out of a much wider and richer actual array of habits of thought, practices, and events, the social memory of the whole array being through ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Things in Two’s are Sometimes, but not Always, Dichotomies
• Part I: On Theory
• Part II: On Masculine/feminine
• Conclusion: On Practice
• Notes
• Index